


Fire and Ice

by flecksofpoppy



Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Beer, F/F, Yuri
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-02
Updated: 2012-02-02
Packaged: 2017-10-30 12:10:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/331610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flecksofpoppy/pseuds/flecksofpoppy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sand, snow, memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire and Ice

**Author's Note:**

> No idea where this came from. Thanks to deadcellredux for beta reading!

Snow resembles sand in its brilliance when it shines in the sun.

The vastness of tundras and mountains, places where cold grows as prettily as snow flowers, flakes, unique assortments of lines and veins and pattern, are as empty as dunes in the sun shedding sheaths of dry powder when the wind blows.

When Terra casts magic in the desert she swears that in a memory of mountains that drop into nothing, she can still feel the burn of the slave crown digging into her forehead. She can feel it even in the heat; even as Locke and Edgar stare at her for what she is.

The heat waves as dizzily as flurries of snow, startling motion in the blinding sunlight.

Vector is a city of dark steel and slow-tarnishing surfaces; it is her home. In a city of right-angled drops and straight lines, it is remarkable how voice travels through the streets, how screams travel through metal. The sounds adopt the timbre of human cries, voice cast against metal, bouncing off hard, cold surfaces.

Voice there is hurled brutally against metal floors and walls and becomes dissonant, inhuman, a sad small echo of what it once might have been. Voices in Vector, that may have started out as opposition, suffering, magic-infused screams, become nothing except echoes that no one answers.

Traitors warm the heart. 

Terra does not know kindness; Terra does not know freedom. Terra, for all intents and purposes, is not human; neither before the slave crown nor after. Later, she will feel guilty in her darkest moments, amidst the distant sounds of children laughing, that it took the end of the world for her to discover empathy. She will blame it on herself, at least for a little while, because not everything can be blamed on villains.

But at some point, she reconsiders, for she herself was a villain at one point in a snow-piled distant place that she only remembers by frostbite.

There are also comforting memories of Vector: secure straight lines, screws with intent, holding the patchwork of civilization together, but all surfaces that led only in one direction.

Wind curves; snow flurries accost; and sand grates. 

Celes's hands curve and accost and grate too. And sometimes, in the night, she cries because she says, _"You're a soldier, there is no shame in this."_

Terra doesn't understand tears as well as these _people_ around her do; she grapples with this realization because she knows, it's not simply a lack of empathy or understanding. It is something about _her_ that is different; unchanged in the most fundamental meaning of the word, because there is something under the surface there in her body, like grass under snow, like a castle under a desert, that is present.

The taste of tears is something that Terra will associate with both pleasure and human connection; why people cry though, Terra will never completely understand. 

At first, she thinks it is because she is not human. At last, she realizes, it is because she is not whole, and being only part-human has nothing to do with it.

There is warmth in Celes's hands that are calluses and sword brands and harsh words; there is something there against Terra's skin that feels like home, feels like the straight lines that they both desperately crave and despise, something that can lead them out of purgatory.

When Terra arches her back, she does not cry; it is Celes who cries, quietly, wanting pleasure and wanting _something_ that she is unable to name. It is the most petty of connections--sex, simple corporeal satisfaction--and yet it is not. Not for them.

 _"In the night,"_ Celes says, her fingers pressing into the same place where a slave crown bit into flesh with the frost of stars and tundra and a mad man's touch, _"I hear that laughter still, in my dreams."_

Tears freeze to the face in arctic conditions, and coal does nothing to assuage the burning cold.

The heat of the desert and of a man's attention; the frost of a woman's fingers and her ghosts--this is Terra's lot in life. This is what she has felt on her skin--slave crown and touches alike--this is for what she smiles, fire and ice.

It's hollows that swallow up voice in those places, cold or hot, but always vast, that Terra knows most intimately--better than the dip of a hip or the sweet silk of golden hair.

It's the hollows when wind catches on a crevice, when voice catches on something tender, that Terra knows.

Terra knows snow and sand; she knows howls, the noise that tries to fill up vast places, the snow flowers that blossom on her forehead with frostbite and the hot rushing desert that tries to suffocate her, pull her underground, rip her to pieces.

Terra wishes that she could become the wind; and eventually, she does.


End file.
